"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere
covering for the most horrid crimes-- a justifier of the most appalling
barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter
under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of
slaveholders find the strongest protection. Where I to be again reduced
to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being
the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall
me...I...hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering,
partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."
[Frederick Douglass, "After the Escape"]